Lodhi language

Lodhi
Native to India
Region Orissa, West Bengal, Jharkhand
Native speakers
25,000  (2007 survey)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 lbm
Glottolog lodh1246[2]

Lodhi (Lodi, Lohi, Lozi) is a Munda language, or perhaps dialect cluster, of India that has been strongly influenced by neighboring Eastern Indic languages.

Ethnologue notes high levels of lexical similarity (50–75%) with Oriya, Bengali, and Kharia Thar, and that it is only spoken by one quarter of ethnic Lodhi in Orissa. However, while admitting that Lodhi is related to Sora, a Munda language, Ethnologue classifies it as Indic (Bengali–Assamese), and it is considered a variety of Hindi in the Indian census. It may be that there are both Munda and Indic varieties subsumed under the name Lodhi.

However, Anderson (2008:299) suggests that Lodhi (Lodha) of northern Orissa may be an Indo-Aryan lect rather than an endangered Munda language; some members use the autonym Sabar[a].

References

  1. Lodhi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Lodhi". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.